ENO
edward.seckerson
Melody Moore is well named. Her parents must have had a sixth sense that she would be "melodious". This exciting young American soprano has been making waves on both sides of the Atlantic. She has established footholds at both San Francisco and Los Angeles Opera and in the 2008/9 season made her English National Opera debut in Jonathan Miller's new production of La bohème. She returns to the ENO this season as Marguerite in Des McAnuff's new staging of Gounod's Faust, a role which seems to define the direction in which her voice and career are taking her.
Hers is a lyric voice with Read more ...
David Nice
As the glorious parade of British orchestras at the Proms has showcased, it's never been a better time for the native music scene across the board. Now the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, currently enjoying a honeymoon period with its Music Director of two seasons Andris Nelsons, has taken another step towards consolidating its post-Rattle reputation. Edward Gardner (pictured above in ENO rehearsal by Chris Christodoulou), currently doing wonderful things at English National Opera, is to take up the post of Principal Guest Conductor in September 2011.It's been a good year for both Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Ever since I can remember, the composer Mieczyslaw Weinberg has played a walk-on part in histories of Soviet music. If you find him in an index at all (probably under Vainberg or Vajnberg, and usually with the first name given him by a box-ticking Soviet border guard in 1939: Moisey, or even Moshe), you’ll usually end up reading one of those melancholy and unhelpful lists: “Shostakovich’s followers include...”Grove’s Dictionary concedes a short and somewhat misleading entry: “His works are often based on a programme, largely autobiographical in nature.” Boris Schwarz, in the standard, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Since his death at the San Marino Grand Prix in 1994, the legend of charismatic Brazilian racing driver Ayrton Senna has grown to almost mythic proportions. Last year the three-time world champion was voted Best Driver in F1 History in a drivers’ poll in Autosport magazine, and a new documentary about his career is due in cinemas this autumn from Working Title Films.More remarkably, an opera about Senna’s life has been jointly commissioned by New York’s Metropolitan Opera and English National Opera. Due to premiere in London in autumn 2012, Senna (as it’s called) will feature music by Read more ...
David Nice
Perhaps we can drop the "sir" here, as he preferred, though most of the contributors below only knew him in his knighted later years. No death of a musical great, at least since the departure of Mstislav Rostropovich, has caused such a flurry of tributes and reminiscences, even if many of us were long prepared for the end and marvelled at the way he soldiered on to give more great performances in his final year. Tributes from Kit Armstrong, Isobel Buchanan, Colin Currie, Sir John Eliot Gardiner, Edward Gardner, Linda Esther Gray, Roy McEwan, David Nice, Peter Rose and Edward Seckerson.If you Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Sir Charles Mackerras has died at the age of 84. In tribute to one of the most highly respected and best-loved of conductors, theartsdesk republishes here an interview he gave on the eve of conducting Benjamin Britten's The Turn of the Screw for the English National Opera last October. Despite bouts of ill health, he found time to talk about his friendship - and falling out - with Britten, his time conducting the opera under Britten's watchful eye, his experiences in Prague in 1948 as a witness to the Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia, his pioneering performances of Mozart from the 1960s Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Rarely have I seen an opera where so much of the activity, so much of the detailed business of relating, loving, falling out and hating, has rung so true for so much of the time. And never do I remember this truthfulness coming from such simplicity. For, in terms of set, costume and conception, this is a very ordinary, recognisable, dependable, 19th-century Tosca. But what soprano-cum-director Catherine Malfitano (once a star Tosca herself) does with these familiar ingredients is quite extraordinary.We don't have to wait long for the first sign that Malfitano's handling of the drama will be Read more ...
edward.seckerson
Acclaimed British mezzo Sarah Connolly prepares for the title role in Donizetti's battle royal of rival queens Maria Stuarda. Her return to Opera North in the bel cantorole of her choice will be one of the highlights of the UK opera season and in this revealing podcast she gives fascinating insight into her extensive preparation and "anatomisation" of the roles she performs - right down to the fine detailing here of Mary's temperament and bearing, and even her height.What is going through her head in the moments before the "confrontation" which in reality never actually took place? What Read more ...
David Nice
Many of us younger opera-goers have never had a chance until now to see Hans Werner Henze's Elegy for Young Lovers in action. Opinions have been divided on its status as one of the great operas of the last half-century, but it certainly brought out the composers: the night I went, both Thomas Adès and Mark-Anthony Turnage were in the audience, and at Saturday's final performance the 83-year-old composer was there for what must surely be the most perfectly co-ordinated, visually beautiful production he could ever hope to see.After an evening of Birtwistle's The Minotaur, a venerable old friend Read more ...
edward.seckerson
She was the Tosca who played live to an audience of one billion in 107 countries; she is the director of English National Opera's new staging of the opera they once dubbed Puccini's "shabby little shocker". How times change. In this exclusive ENO podcast, Catherine Malfitano says that it's high time we moved on from the Tosca-as-diva portrayal - that, she says, should remain offstage where Puccini left it.
She talks about the games she plays with her young performers to find a deeper truth and how she draws daily upon the fruits of a glorious career spanning 30-plus years in over 70 roles. Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
We all know what you get when you find yourself snowed in with your family up a mountain: thunderous carpets, corridors of blood, redrum and a head in the snow. Hans Werner Henze's Elegy for Young Lovers isn't quite as murderously single-minded as Kubrick's The Shining, but it is dominated by a single terrorising nut job.A gemütlich Austrian inn is the setting. The opening scene sees an incontinent flurry of activity as kith and kin await the descent for breakfast of the great poet Gregor Mittenhofer (Stephen Page). Mittenhofer is your strip-cartoon Romantic: an ungovernable poet-vulture, Read more ...